500 words a day on whatever I want

The Trump Era

The Trump Era (2015-2025?) was a bad dream until last night. Now that Donald Trump, a conman and reality TV star, has won the 2016 election for US president, the nightmare of “Make America Great Again” has only begun.

Back in the warm, sunny days of August I said on the alt-right thread:

“If Trump, or someone like him, becomes president, their [alt-right] ideas will become more respectable and widespread. But I think the US has already demographically passed that bend in the river where a White nationalist sort could become president.”

Well, clearly, we have not passed that bend in the river. We are there. Now.

Opinion polls last summer showed that Trump’s racism was turning off more White voters than it gained. As it turns out, many of those Whites were only pretending to be turned off. The election showed their true colours.

The Anti-Obama: If you see President Trump as a White backlash against having a Black president, then this is payback, the price Blacks will pay for a largely symbolic Black presidency. What little good President Obama has done will be wiped away.

“What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked Blacks during the campaign. Quite a bit. At the very least, racial profiling, police brutality and especially voter suppression will almost certainly increase for people of colour. Most likely bullying and hate crimes will too.

And it could get worse: When Reagan became president I never imagined the Crack Era. Add to that Trump’s lack of government or military experience, a first among US presidents.

Silver linings: Trying to look on the bright side of this:

Tons of racists have just outed themselves. More will continue to do so. Keep notes.

Hopefully Trump’s victory will:

Prove that elections are are not rigged and that voting matters.

Wake up people to how much racism there still is in US society.

Provide clear-cut enemies to bring together Black people, if not people of colour and anti-racists.

End the Clinton infestation of the Democratic Party.

Strengthen the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party, bringing it back to being a party that cares more about ordinary people than big banks (the Obama-Clinton wing).

2042: If most White people had any sense they would use this period, before they become a minority in 2042, to strengthen minority rights for everyone. But most White people clearly lack sense: they voted for Trump.

The constitution: I will be happy if Trump just sticks to the constitution and does not become a fascist. That will limit the damage he can do to the US: in two years he could lose control of Congress, as Obama did in 2010 (Vote in 2018!!!). And in four years, eight at most, he will be out.

The handmaidens of racism: Long-term, the most unsettling thing about Trump’s win is the 29% of Latinos and Asians who voted for him. If that number grows, White racist policymaking will continue long after non-Hispanic Whites have become a minority.

– Abagond, 2016.

Update (November 20th): Another silver lining of the Trump Era is that maybe the White Liberal press will stop turning a blind eye to stuff like drones, mass deportations and weakening human rights.

You were right in predicting the Fourth Enlargement of American Whiteness. Now you are seeing the ugly side. A good number of Latin@ people look white, act white, think white, and are increasingly seen as white by other whites. This also means they vote white, even against mestizo, indigenous, and black Latin@s who are considered their natural allies conventional racial thinking. Many of these people voted for Donald Trump. “Non-Hispanic whites” will increasingly become an irrelevant category, it will just be “whites” again, and the end of white majority will have been postponed another few decades. It’s insidious. They’ll probably do it again at some point, though at this point they’re running out of new ethnic groups to invite into the White Club.

If Trump is able to make good on even a few of his promises, Americans as a whole will prosper. Bringing back manufacturing while cutting off immigration will only ensure more work for Americans. 1 manufacturing job supports 3 service sector jobs. Scaling back America’s imperial adventures abroad will also provide the US middle class with a huge tax relief. These are all great policies. Ordinarily, most Americans should cheer, but as we can see from the reactions here, muh feelz > economic prosperity (and common sense).

As more Americans begin to make more money and enjoy a rising standard of living, the cacophony of liberal identity politics and grievance mongering will gradually fade away. As Americans can more easily afford to pay their bills and mortgages, few will care about pampered white women whining about manspreading, or trans-freaks whining about not being pampered for their degeneracy.

History has been made. The Alt right will take you to the promised land of economic prosperity even as you whine, kick, and scream all the way.

@Abagond: I would like to recommend Eddie S. Glaube Jr.’s book Democracy In Black How Race Still Enslaves The American Soul. It reminds me of your blog and some of the many discussions we have in regard to race and class etc.,. You should check it out.

Tons of racists have not necessarily “outed” themselves. You are making an oversimplification based on your dominant view about the type of society you think you live in. I made some comments in the preceding thread about the error of oversimplifying the electoral result that has borne fruit.

When people are marginalized, alienated, disappointed (in the Obama presidency and the continuing aftermath of the 2008 crash ,as examples of possible disappointments) and scared: they can do and will do things that are unpleasant or extreme. Why do they do this? Survival instinct is one good motivator and causal factor. When you’re trying to survive, are you really going to watch your p’s and q’s about whether you’re becoming racist, appearing racist, appearing sexist, being sexist, etc? Combine trying to survive with having low education levels. You think someone who is underemployed and has low education is also going to magically not be susceptible to racist politicians who promise better days for them personally. Much of Trumps support are lower class, poorly educated people. Depending on context it can be ridiculous, useless and ineffective to label them as racist.

I have been reading and viewing a mix of political and economic commentary to do with the elections. I have also been recalling policies from the past. The election result you guys got CAN NOT be tidily reduced to just “evil racists” who were simply motivated by racism, anymore than those who purport to be feminists want to say HRC lost because the presidency was a “glass ceiling” that “kept her down”. The truth is that people just don’t like her, it has nothing to do with glass ceilings; Senator Warren (or even Michelle Obama) may prove me right on this point, in four years time. And similarly voting for Trump does not necessarily prove racism, it could just demonstrate years of political alienation, economic hardships (dating back to Bill Clinton) and the effects of undereducation and plain old stupidity (which can result from being undereducated and thus lacking the intellectual tools to make sense of a sometimes threatening and always complicated world).

manufacturing jobs are never, never, NEVER, coming back to the U.S. Since the 90’s the corporations strove to be transnational entities, in order to hire labour at it’s cheapest rate. They are not going to change this practice now, why would they? Further, if if the jobs were to come back, corporations are determined to automate or robotize any and every job that they can. A guided laser welding a car together will be utilized rather than a person. A self driving heavy rig in the fracking fields will be utilized rather than a person. (these things already happening)

Even if Trump were a champion of the proletariat, which he most certainly is not, the technological times are a changing. Unfortunately, many in Trump’s base don’t know this or do know it and are doing the ostrich thing for a bit.

I am disgusted by the election results. I never expected that this racist, sexist and xenophobe would be president of the United States. Deep down, I believe he was elected by many White Americans to repeal any policy President Obama put into place.

The Popular Vote, which is what “We The People” partake in, means nothing. If it did, Hillary Clinton would be President. It’s the Electoral that matters and she was hammered in that area. Vote locally. Choose your senators, representatives and congressmen wisely. Your Presidential vote does not matter. IMO.

The reason Trump won is because you did not vote for his opponent. Yes, you, the persons who couldn’t vote for Clinton because she was “just as bad” or whatever self-righteous reason you had. Trump is YOUR fault. Thanks. I don’t want to hear any complaining, ever, from anyone who failed to vote for Clinton.

2020 is already lost. Running against Trump will be a fool’s errand and the dems have nobody now. Gonna be a long 8 years.

Thanks again folks. Enjoy it, you earned it! Explain to your latino and Muslim friends and your daughters how you took such a courageous, noble stand against Clinton. How nice for you.

People don’t want to vote for a candidate they can’t stand! The DNC couldn’t stand to run Sanders so they chose to give the candidacy to a candidate whom they know is not liked. The DNC suppressed voter turnout by offering a rotten candidate that no one likes. Good going DNC! 🙂

I know I haven’t been around much, but I wanted to stop by to thank you for the critical role you have played in helping to get DT elected. You tirelessly worked to stir up black grievances and contributed to racially motivated protests that shocked and scared the nation and resulted in thousands of blacks lives lost (through the Ferguson effect). It’s unfortunate that those lives were needlessly lost (and supremely ironic that people saying “black lives matter” both caused those deaths and steadfastly ignored them, choosing to focus on the vanishingly small possibility of being unarmed and not at fault and being shot by a cop instead), but maybe there is a silver lining in DT’s election.

Trump is going to be facing a lot of headwinds when he takes office, so we need you to keep agitating. The more BLM and other black racist groups can destroy, the more DT will have a mandate to bring back law and order and the more the people will be united against a group that clearly hurts the country, and most tangibly the thousands of lives lost due to the Ferguson effect. So keep up the good work here and thanks again for your efforts!

As more Americans begin to make more money and enjoy a rising standard of living, the cacophony of liberal identity politics and grievance mongering will gradually fade away.

You read like someone who clings to an identity, white supremacy.

Bringing back manufacturing while cutting off immigration will only ensure more work for Americans.

Who’s going to take the jobs no one else wants? Here in Ontario for example, they ‘import’ seasonal workers for harvesting since they cannot get ‘Canadian. born to do it. I know the pay is low and the work physically demanding but work is work. Even College and University students won’t take summer jobs doing this. Why is this? It is the same in the States except the people opt to stay.

Cheers from Canada, STFU.

So keep up the good work here and thanks again for your efforts!

No biff, thank you for the unrelenting jocularity and hilarity you bring to this space! Were you on vacation?

omg every time i mention i have my own business ppl ask iif i’m hiring, the irony there is that typically construction and hospitality workers are ‘undocumented workers,’ trump’s empire dodged that bullet!
simply lower taxes won’t ‘create jobs’. he has to work with what dubya left us with; ‘classification’ of sandwich making as ‘(final) assembly’ ie manufacturing

“The handmaidens of racism: Long-term, the most unsettling thing about Trump’s win is the 29% of Latinos and Asians who voted for him. If that number grows, White racist policymaking will continue long after non-Hispanic Whites have become a minority.”
Once again, everything is reduced to race? Everybody running was white, when did Hillary become an honorary black woman? Why should anyone be surprised that 29% of Latinos and Asians voted for DT? The real mystery is that so few of them did, Kiwi must have intuited where the wind was about to blow, so he bailed out on you. Even if they had voted like Blacks, would that have been sufficient to turn back the DT tide?
The stupid habit of claiming that Whites are “privileged” and should just part with said privileges isn’t a terribly useful way to look at things.
Can you make a serious argument for the social benefits, for all, of the Obama era?
Even racist old LBJ did more for the common man than the self confessed Reagan admirer.
As for Clinton, you may have wished to overlook her Janus nature of promising one thing in public while promising to the elites that they would come first, in private, Whites, who aren’t afraid to demand and expect to get what they ask for, felt no obligation to hold their noses and vote for someone they didn’t like or trust.
They consider themselves free and act like it. Blacks could learn from such attitude.
HRC won more votes than DT, maybe you should examine the Electoral College system instead of finding racial scapegoats.
DT did have at least a few positives, such as his refusal to continue the wars of the Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama presidencies and a lack of enthusiasm for war with Russia. Maybe it might be more useful to demand he fulfills his pledge to get along with Russia and avoid nuclear conflict.

I think there is a racial component behind a lot of Trump’s support but I also think that there is more going on.

As we we know the wealth gap has increased between the middle.class and.the wealthy and NAFTA is part of the reason for this. The last 20 years has left many Americans behind and whites,.who once had these nice jobs, see Trump as some who they believe can change that.

The DNC didn’t see this in the “rust belt”. Bernie voters there voted for Trump because of trade.

The other aspect of Trump is the anti establishment vote that both the D’s and the R’s were blind too. The Clinton campain preferred to run against Trump (Wikileaks emails) because they thought he would be the easiest opponent to defeat.

The Republicans thought the same way as well and worried that the party would rack up losses down ballot in a Hillary Clinton landslide.

MSNBC gleefully spoke about how the Democrats were going to take back the House and Senate in this imaginary Trump implosion.

The polls were off as soon as they went from tracking registered voters to those who they imagined “likely voters” to be. Polling companies underrepresented rural voters by as much as 12%. and some people polled misled pollsters because they didn’t want to tell pollsters they were supporting Trump.

In Florida we had the DNC and the “Hispanic surge” stratagy not realizing that the voters they were getting to the polls were actually voting for Trump.

Leftist pied pipers usually lead their suckers down a dead end street and then blame their opponents for placing a wall there. If professional victims actually cared about black people they would rejoice that Trump will stop immigration which would help African Americans who won’t have to compete with illegals for jobs. Higher black employment leads to fewer blacks engaging in their usual shenanigans which would lead to fewer ‘gentle giants’ getting shot. Higher employment for African Americans ought to be celebrated, but not here; for in on this website muh feelz > common sense and sound economic policies.

If it’s so great, why don’t you move down here? I’m sure you’d easily find someone willing to trade places with you. Give up that free Canadian healthcare and be a real man in America, where you have to stand on your own two feet unlike you cosseted Canadians in your socialist welfare state. Experience for yourself what it’s like to be a brown South Asian Muslim immigrant in Trump’s USA.

Moving to the US is pretty hard (nothing wrong with that) so I doubt that it’s going to happen anytime soon. Immigrating to Canada is much easier since liberal immigration policy is retarded. I’m lucky to be a Canadian but even I wouldn’t want South Asians to be a majority here (look at how India and Pakistan turned out). I enjoy a cushy first world lifestyle thanks to whites and so I’d rather whites continue running things so that I can continue enjoying my cushy lifestyle. Why ruin a good thing?

You couldn’t make it down here. Too used to your cushy easy lifestyle which you just admitted you only enjoy because of the liberal policies of Canada. Yet you despise the liberals who made it possible for you to immigrate to Canada in the first place.

You don’t have what it takes to be an American, much less a successful POC in America. You’d be eaten alive. Keep sucking on the liberal government teat in your socialist paradise.

So this whole idea of Trump’s impending presidency actually being a good thing for black Americans belies mainstream America’s capacity for screwing over blacks in any available way, shape or form.

If any manufacturing jobs are coming back to the US, for example, they’re going to Walmart polo-wearing white workers in the south and Rust Belt states. In the meantime, nothing will be done to address the ongoing poverty and inequality suffered by black Americans — at least not on the government’s end.

Issues such as police brutality will be status quo ante. In fact, I daresay whites who were paying lip service to Black Lives Matter will finally feel emboldened enough to do what they actually wanted — to openly support the police in its efforts in managing America’s long-standing “negro problem.”

So no, 4 to 8 years of Trump won’t be good for us. But then again, there was never a time when things were made “good” for us by any U.S. government. We still have plenty of lessons to learn and we’re still being hardheaded as hell about learning them.

“As we we know the wealth gap has increased between the middle.class and.the wealthy and NAFTA is part of the reason for this. The last 20 years has left many Americans behind and whites,.who once had these nice jobs, see Trump as some who they believe can change that.

The DNC didn’t see this in the “rust belt”. Bernie voters there voted for Trump because of trade.”

That is a Trump talking point. Maybe you are too young to remember the 1980s. I will let Billy Joel give you a refresher course. His song “Allentown” came out in 1982:

Legion @ Dota,
manufacturing jobs are never, never, NEVER, coming back to the U.S.

Since the 90’s the corporations strove to be transnational entities, in order to hire labour at it’s cheapest rate. They are not going to change this practice now, why would they?

Further, if if the jobs were to come back, corporations are determined to automate or robotize any and every job that they can. A guided laser welding a car together will be utilized rather than a person. A self driving heavy rig in the fracking fields will be utilized rather than a person. (these things already happening)

Linda says,

Legion, I just wanted to high-lite what you wrote because truer words have never been spoken.

I watched with my own two eyes the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and communism in Europe. Corporate America didn’t let 1 day go past before they were already in former communist countries making deals and turning their attention to Russia and China, salivating and drooling to get in.

Most people seemed to forget that it was Corporate America that pushed for NAFTA in the 90s and they begun offshoring because they wanted to make bigger profits… the USA is a capitalist country.

The President cannot force corporations to bring back jobs, he can only make the environment pretty and lush enough to entice them

“cheap labor = more profits, buy low – sell high”

those are the first and most important commandments of any business that wants to be financially successful.

I’ll start to believe Trump can do what he says, when Walmart brings their huge manufacturing plants back to the USA or if Trump himself, moves his manufacturing back from China first.

Walmart already stated that they can try to bring some of the jobs back but it will have more automation than human beings.

So when Wal-Mart announced in 2013 it would spend an extra $250 billion over 10 years on domestically produced goods, it also estimated that the shift would create 250,000 manufacturing jobs.

The return so far is a fraction of that — a cautionary tale for Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who’s made even bigger and bolder pledges to bring factory employment back to the U.S.

“If you bring back a plant you aren’t going to bring back 100 or 200 people, you will want to automate it so it costs less,” said Gregory Daco, head of U.S. macroeconomics at Oxford Economics. “If you do that, there is really no direct benefit for potential employees.”

If you are lucky he will make such a complete mess of things that In four years time those poor white folk who feel he is the man who at last is going to listen to them, get them jobs and decent education and health care will realise that the country is in chaos and he hasn’t made true on his promises. The only solution will be change… The way is now being set for good leadership in the future. I hope so.

The fact that so many people have issues with immigrants always surprises me. I don’t know about there but here is all the immigrants were to go on strike the country would literally come to a stand still. I wish they would do it so that all those fascists/racists would really see how the country runs. No public transport, no energy. no hospitals. No emergency care. No shops, no financial services, no education.

“Whites, who aren’t afraid to demand and expect to get what they ask for, felt no obligation to hold their noses and vote for someone they didn’t like or trust.
They consider themselves free and act like it. Blacks could learn from such attitude.”-gro jo
Now that phrase would kick start a revolution. Oh, if black people would only learn. I can only hope.

As with everything in America it was about race but I believe Trump’s win wasn’t entirely about race. Part of it was a rejection of the “establishment”, both political and media, that anointed Hillary Clinton as President. Appeal to identity didn’t quite work this time; only about half of white women voted for Hillary Clinton. White people obviously made Obama president, twice, and a lot of those same white people rejected Hillary. Electoral votes that he easily won in 2012, she lost. She’s not a popular figure. She lost the nomination to the newbie, Obama, in 2008 and she might have lost to Bernie in 2016 if everything was above-board. Quite frankly, the democrats miscalculated when they selected Clinton and even connived to make sure she was nominated. So we have President Trump.

@sharina
I didn’t read it all yet but, by Jove, that would be a disaster. There was some talk of something similar happening after Trump won the Republican nomination by a majority but without reaching a certain threshold. But can you imagine what the country would be like if that happened? If Clinton lost the election and yet still became President? Yikes. I think I’d just grab some of dorisjean’s popcorn at that point….while boarding a flight to Fiji, or better yet, Antarctica.

From day one, you notice she’s a weak speaker despite a life time of political campaigning and activism. Not a very strong voice compiled with non-protocol scandals. Obama had to go and help her out and he was way more convincing with his last minute speeches but it felt like he was helping out a disabled friend. Not all these working class non-educated whites are racist.. Like some of the browns, yellows, and blacks they wanted change. It’s too bad that change couldn’t have come with Bernie Sanders would probably would have won against Trump.

“I am not YET buying the White Liberal media talking point that this was all about, *sniff*, White working-class men, that race had little to do with it.”
So, who was the ‘black woman’ running for office? Why didn’t the Trump crowd show up eight or four years ago?
Why is anybody black so butthurt over the defeat of HRC? Has she been that ‘good’ to Blacks? Unlike Blacks, “people from Peoria” know they have rights that must be taken seriously. What did Blacks get from the eight years of Obama? Nothing but lectures about how inadequate they are. Now they will be blamed for all the perceived wrongs of society as usual.
Please explain the role “race” played. Trump got fewer votes than HRC, most of the people in the streets protesting his election are white. What this election confirmed, was the diversity of the USA. What needs to be explained is the defection of a number of Obama voters either to Trump or to the 43.4% who didn’t bother to vote. All this crying over HRC’s loss and looking for scapegoats among Asians and Latinos is useless. Blacks aren’t the ‘natural’ leaders of minorities, other minorities will do what they perceive to be in their best interest, even if that means seeking “honorary white” status, so get over it.

Indeed. I thought when so many Republican politicians turned against Trump that it would hurt his chances of being elected. Now I suspect many voters saw that as a sign he was truly an outsider: “Hey, his own party doesn’t want him to be president! He must really be going to shake things up if all these lousy career politicians are shaking in their boots.”

Recently, the candidates that have campaigned on “change” have won. That was Obama’s mantra in 2008: “Change you can believe in”. His 2012 win over Romney was not as convinving as his 2008 victory of Mccain. Now, in addition to being inherently unpopular Clinton was the antithesis of a “change” candidate. Indeed, her campaign message, whether communicated overtly or covertly, was that you needed to elect her to PREVENT Trump’s brand of change. Now suppose you’re hurting economically and don’t want things to continue the same way. You’d probably be more willing to give Trump a chance than to vote for “more of the same”. Historically, incumbent parties have found it more difficult to return to power after two consecutive terms.

Now, *IF* the stupid democratic party had read the tea leaves properly they would absolutely have allowed Sanders to be their nominee. Even though Sanders was a career politician vying for the ruling party’s nomination he WAS seen as a “change” candidate and he was *tremendously* popular. The choice would not have been between “change” and “more of the same” but two different approaches to change. Their decision to pit Trump’s populism against the neoliberal sellout, Hillary Clinton, is what sealed our fate months ago.

Also, this might not be a popular thing to say right now, but it’s got to be said: we are reaping the awful fruits of trigger warnings, Tumblr “SJWs”, and “white privilege” theory in general. I have suspected that something like this might be coming for a while, but I was fooling myself that it couldn’t actually happen.

In other words, a backlash against “political correctness”? People finally fed up of being called “racist,” “misogynistic” and everything else in between? A “take that” against “SJW” culture? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Despite with Trump has said, he doesn’t think like that. Take a closer look at his bio and background, particularly his father. He played on racists emotions to help win the election. But these horrid people (the racist ones) are going to find some great disappointment. There will be no wall. Overall it’s going to be much like after Obama sold out to the establishment. Trump and his family friends come first, they just so happen to run within the same circles as Clinton. The real change, that has been stated time and time again, was Bernie Sanders.

@Solitaire.
Exactly, it backfired. Trump was presenting himself as a force for change and an “anti-establishment” figure so rejection by the powerful politicians in his own party only appeared to give him more “cred”. It actually bolstered his brand.

Trump sells a dream masterfully but I don’t think we have to worry that he’ll deliver on most of it if “Trump University”, “The Trump Network” etc. is anything to go on.

Why is anybody black so butthurt over the defeat of HRC? Has she been that ‘good’ to Blacks? Unlike Blacks, “people from Peoria” know they have rights that must be taken seriously. What did Blacks get from the eight years of Obama? Nothing but lectures about how inadequate they are. Now they will be blamed for all the perceived wrongs of society as usual.

Because black Americans are still hoping against hope that the U.S., as a whole, will finally do right by them instead of kicking them further down the hole. Our relationship with white America is the ultimate domestic abuse scenario.

Alot of rich black males & females have a tight lid on the situation here. They don’t care and even exacerbate the problem. I can drive into Georgetown or Mclean here in the DC area or into a library where they take on some of the same prejudice mindsets. They call themselves democratic liberals and such and such…. It’s okay I’m all used to all of it by now.

Honestly, I understand the feelings of insecurity given the apparent preference racists have for Trump but I’d encourage everyone to try not to personalize this too much. Just as Obama’s presidency didn’t suddenly make America completely racially united I don’t think everything will go absolutely to 5hit under Trump. Furthermore, I don’t think he is genuinely committed to racist policies beyond the typical Republican priorities. He didn’t even really want crazy-pss Pence as running-mate but listened to his advisors who thought that’d make him a more credible Republican candidate. Remember, he’s a bit of a charlatan, and I suspect that the dupes this time are those who voted for him because they expect him to be Hitler (hyperbole). Let’s continue to do what we have to do to improve our situation and use any fear we have as motivation to keep pressing on.

On more anecdote re: sharina’s link. I had stumbled on a youtube video looong before the election that claimed to take an astrological look at Trump. The person claimed Trump has an indomitable spirit, cannot be kept down and will always bounce back from adversities but, because of things he said that will be viewed as outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, the presidency would not be conferred on him (I remember a phrase similar to that was used).

I’d vaguely remembered this after the election and thought to myself, “Well, you’re wrong because Trump is president-elect”. Yet it would be quite a interesting twist if Trump actually didn’t become president after winning the election. I’m not sure how that would work. Would it be Hillary or Pence? I’m more scared of Pence than Trump as I think the former, given his record in Indiana, is more ideologically committed to Republican and “Christian right” policies.

“During his campaign Donald Trump said if elected he will “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. He will send troops into Syria and Iraq if the Pentagon agrees. “Unfortunately, it may require boots on the ground to fight the Islamic State,” he writes in Crippled America (2015). “I don’t think it’s necessary to broadcast our strategy. (In fact, one of the most ridiculous policy blunders President Obama has committed was to announce our timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.) If military advisers recommend it, we should commit a limited–but sufficient–number of troops to fight on the ground.””

.

There’s not a nickel worth of difference between the so-called TWO parties. Like a minted coin with two sides to give the appearance of legitimacy the illusion is designed to maintain the status quo by keeping the outside THIRD parties, outside! It’s great theater perpetrated upon the people who serially believe that their vote somehow counts, even while nothing significant ever changes – or remains changed – except the pathetic candidates they parade before us to choose from.

The reality is that they are indeed the super-predators and we are the ones they have brought to heel!

By the way, this is part of the reason for my assessmant of Trump: I notice that he backs away from a lot of his more extreme rhetoric once he’s achieved his goals courtesy of the free media coverage and support from sympathizers. For example, he distanced himself from his history as a birther by saying “Obama was born in the United States, period”, he stepped away from his suggestion of a moratoritum on Muslim immigration after he secured the Republican nomination (much to the chagrin of people like Ann Coulter) and he congratulated Hillary Clinton on her record of service to the nation in his recent victory speech. He’s a businessman. He saw a market for a certain brand of politician and he became it. That doesn’t mean he’s genuinely “it”. That hardly matters though as the people who were attracted to him might very well stick around.

“So-called “‘birthers” are OK with Donald Trump abandoning their cause, as long it helps him win the presidency — even if they still believe Obama was born in Kenya and don’t necessarily agree with his claim that Hillary Clinton started their movement. “

I was gonna write something “witty” but this isn’t a good time for jokes.

Basically Trump has spent all his life being Super-awesome McRichguy with little actual responsibility outside of mumbling that he pleads the fifth in court.

Now he’s met and shaken hands with tens of thousands of people and promised them the moon and the sun, which is easy when you don’t think you’re going to win.

Now he’s in the MUTHA-OF-AL “put up or shut ups” situation that anyone’s ever been in.

These people really want their jobs back and they want their money to go farther and their healthcare to be cheaper and the roads to be better and on and on and on.

If he flops at this, he goes down as the worst ever. If he tries to go full authoritarian, he goes down as America’s Hitler for real.

I don’t think he has no idea what the job entails that he ran for. I can only imagine how godawful his State of the Union addresses will be. They’ll be 5 minutes long of basically “everything is tremendous! Believe me!” nonsense.

I’m betting today President Obama was not willing to provide much job training to the Orange Assclown.

But globally I believe this will emboldened the right wing immoral political racist extremist of all countries into thinking this is going to be a trend that they can capitalize politically in their country’s political systems of government, and in public displays of violence towards others without any meaningful retribution.

This, along with thinking they have an ally in the justification of the persecution of others around the world, and in their own back yards.

I think the real story here is 1) general disaffection with the system 2) the power of marketing (image over substance) w.r.t to Trump’s campaign and 3) the deleterious effect of corruption on democracy where the Clintons and the democratic party is concerned.

Racism is a persistent cloud over everything American but it didn’t prevent Obama’s two terms. Clinton was just too distasteful for many who’d voted for the rather young purveyor of change named Barack Obama. In fact, recall that one of the criticisms against Obama was that he was relatively inexperienced. Some people poked fun at the “community organizer”. Yet he won probably BECAUSE of seeming less entrenched in “Washington politics”.

Sorry for repeating myself but the DNC f-ed up badly by selecting a career politician whose essence ran completely contrary to the zeitgeist. People who called them out on this *before* the election were often silenced or shamed but here we are.

This just shows how powerful the need for white supremacy is. You can be a con-artist, racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, sexual predator, and people, mostly white, will still try to find what’s good about you and use that as the definition as who that person is and why he should be understood, respected, loved and even supported. White people are still seen as “basically morally superior” no matter how screwed up they are.

Biff, you may be pleased as punch that your candidate got elected. But guess what? You’re more screwed than you think. And it’s a shame you don’t know it, because your color arousal is so strong you voted against what was best for the nation AND yourself. I hope you’ll be just as happy four years from now. In the meantime, I’ll await your snarky reply denying everything and proving me right.

If white people want to progress – if they want this nation to progress, they need to wake up and stop supporting whiteness. It’s holding them back in the worst ways. Trump is now the ultimate spokesman for whiteness. In the end, it will only do more harm to white people, not to mention everyone else, than they realize. It already started on election night when the Dow Jones plummeted hundreds of points when Trump was leading in the poles. But they’re so lost, they would likely end up blaming Obama, liberals, everything else instead of blaming the monster that is whiteness.

“Because black Americans are still hoping against hope that the U.S., as a whole, will finally do right by them instead of kicking them further down the hole. Our relationship with white America is the ultimate domestic abuse scenario.”

Mack Lyons,

So true. I tend to think of it as like a kid trying to become a part of the cool group in high school. We’ve spent our collective time and energy trying to integrate into a society that clearly hates and fears us, but tolerates us enough to try to use us to their own benefit. We try so hard for America to love and respect us, seemingly more so than we try to love and respect ourselves. We tend to underestimate the traumas that racism has on us since slavery times. We love America as much as it hates us.

Just continuing the postmortem in light of the results, it turns out that there is some evidence that Clinton’s camp WANTED Trump as her rival to play America into electing her. I’ve been trying to track down the actuall emails on Wikileaks and haven’t found them yet but here is an article from the express.

Wikileaks email shows Clinton ‘sealed her OWN FATE’ in plot to make Donald Trump her rival

A camp Clinton plot to try to harm the Republican campaign by getting more press coverage for the party’s more conservative candidates was revealed in a email released by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.

…

The email from Marissa Astor, and assistant to Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, to Mr Podesta, and copied to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), suggests the campaign knew Mr Trump was going to run for president, and believed by promoting him into the press, it could ultimately harm the Republicans.

…

It said: “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously(sic).

“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate. “We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal:

“1) Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;

“2) Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents.”

Under the heading Pied Piper Candidates the memo continued: “There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above.

…

The memo also showed how the Clinton Campaign would go on the attack against Republican candidates personally to “muddy the waters” scandals linked to Mrs Clinton, including the use of her private email server.

So it turns out we have at least TWO WAYS to blame the DNC for President Trump. They UNDERMINED Bernie Sanders’ campaign, who polls showed did better against Trump, and they actually ACTIVELY PROMOTED TRUMP because they thought Hillary would have a better chance against him than other Republican candidates given her baggage.

How can I truly be sad that the extremely corrupt democratic candidate did not win? We had few alternatives, and it was largely BECAUSE of the democratic party. They helped engineer it, with their media handmaidens, to essentially FORCE America to elect Clinton president. Part of me is doing somersaults that it blew up in their faces but the other part wonders, like many of us, about the real wildcard president that we now have as a result. Nonetheless, our no-win situation is the fruit of DNC machinations so they should not have been rewarded. If there is any bright side, they weren’t.

“I’m more scared of Pence than Trump as I think the former, given his record in Indiana, is more ideologically committed to Republican and “Christian right” policies.”

So right!

Pence and the other Christian Dominionists are scary in the extreme. He will be just a heartbeat away from the presidency after January 2017.

Most of the Republican governors have run their states into the ground. Michigan, Kansas, New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin and Indiana are all exhibit A for deep tax cuts for the wealthy and deep funding cuts in education and other basic services. While those are trends throughout the country and globally, those states have been racing to the bottom at breakneck speed.

In a way, I’m glad this happened. The civil rights movements in the 60s really did a lot of harm to African Americans along with all the good it did. It inspired bigots and racists to become more subtle and sophisticated in their oppression. It’s the main reason most Whites today claim that there is no racism in America. Now, with the advent of a new age of honest and open policies about how one “really feels”, I think our opponents will finally do away with the BS obfuscation and denial. This will not only allow African Americans to easily identify our enemies, but will also show the world the true face of the United States.

“it’s this sort of stuff, the “SJW” culture going all the way back to Peggy McIntosh, that allowed the Republicans’ Southern Strategy to work.”

Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy was going full blast throughout the Reagan (Crack Hysteria) and Bush I presidencies (Willie Horton Ads).

Peggy McIntosh wrote her seminal essay about White Privilege in 1989, years after the Southern Strategy pulled millions of White voters away from the Democratic party to the Republican party. The Republican party at present is nothing more than a White Identity party. McIntosh had little to do with that development.

better than the American brand. much much better. so you gonna disregard the content on that basis? how bout WikiLeaks. isthat putin propaganda too? RT is an antidote to American propaganda like the kind that led to the well deserved fall of Clinton.

“…backlash to “political correctness.” However, these two things have undeniable similarities. Both of them have gotten us to this abyss. Both led to the rise of this monster.”

In my opinion, what led to the “rise of this monster” is the White polity swimming in real privilege and feeling threatened by other humans they consider “inferior” demanding respect and human decency.

Reading various websites over the past 24 hours, I have seen a lot of blame and recrimination of everything and everyone involved in the 2016 US election; HRClinton, the media, African American voters and the two political parties. Everyone is supposedly to blame except the masses of predominantly White voters who elevated a person unfit to be county dogcatcher to the presidency of the United States of America. They did so because they reveled in his loud and vulgar racism, which had the effect of polishing their privilege and boosting their egos.

✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪✪

I find these repeated denials of White privilege pretty hilarious and revealing. The people who are most opposed to the reality of White privilege are those people who have experienced some form of hereditary privilege all of their lives. Whether that privilege comes from inherited wealth or skin color, the denials are similarly emphatic.

White privilege is not a guarantee of a good life. White privilege merely stacks the odds of a good life in the favor of people of European heritage——at the expense of non-European people. Neither discomfort nor denial changes that reality.

Sociologist Allan Johnson points out:

“For some whites, the share of benefits is greater or lesser than it is for others, depending on, among other things, the dynamics of social class. But one thing is certain: collectively, the white population of the United States now holds an enormous unearned advantage of wealth and power. And regardless of what kind of people we are as individuals or what we have or have not done ourselves, that advantage cannot be uncoupled from the history of race and racism in this country. The past is more than history. It is also present in structural distributions of wealth and power and cultural ideologies, laws, practices, beliefs, and attitudes whose effect is to justify, defend, and perpetuate the system of white privilege.”

The real fear may be a loss of centrality and control. Every institution in this society is geared to making European descent people feel both “normal” and “superior”. Losing that sense of “specialness” can be jarring. As one writer put it, “The problem with being privileged your whole life is that [after] you have had that privilege for so long, equality starts to look like oppression.”

…in his opinion only white southerners (and lately the denizens of Wyoming) are racist.

That’s a hoot! There are lots of places I have encountered racial bigotry in the North, Midwest and West. I’ve also had Black family, friends and colleagues regale me with tales of racial ugliness from Maine to Colorado, North Carolina to Oregon.

I think distilling Trump’s win down to “racism” is too one-sided and I’m not one to let racist America off the hook. It was definitely a factor but the selection of HRC was also a major miscalculation in an era where people clearly wanted to shake things up. This was not a phenomenon unique to republican voters because Bernie Sanders’ movement within the ruling party had built up tremendous momentum before it was killed by the PTB. After that it the establishment candidate was pitted against the one that sold himself as being anti-establishment when people were indicating dissatisfaction with the status quo.

The only thing Clinton had to offer was that she wasn’t Trump. Think, for a moment, how self-centered the slogan, “I’m with her” is. It doesn’t communicate anything about what she’ll be doing. It’s just a declaration that you’ll be voting for her. IIRC another one was “Love Trumps Hate”, which gives more prominence to her opponent by using his name! Meanwhile she had scandals buzzing around her while running for president and Trump was promising to “Make America Great Again”. IMO, the choice of Hillary was the deciding factor. Sanders would have beaten Trump.

[Closing]
Sanders is dominating the blue states and swing states. Trump is dominating the red states and swing states. The takeaway should be clear: The American people in general, and particularly the states that will decide this election, do not want an establishment candidate. A Trump v. Clinton race could play out much like Ronald Reagan v. Bush Sr., Carter and Mondale: races where people with the “right”
resumes failed to connect with the public — losing handily to a contender who seemed far less qualified or competent, and perhaps even dangerous, but who really “gets“ the times we’re living in and what people are looking for in this moment.

Bernie Sanders can beat Donald Trump, possibly taking the House and Senate with him. Hillary Clinton can do none of these things. Polls be damned: if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, Donald Trump will win the presidency. Count on it

[Closing]
If Trump eventually wins the White House, it will be the fault of “progressive” writers and media. The people who defended Clinton at all costs, regardless of the latest controversy, have done this country a disservice. The journalists who focused on removing Bernie Sanders from the race, while at the same time spreading the notion that Trump must be stopped (even if Bernie was cheated), helped create the “Never Hillary” hashtag. When voters are deceived and then told to accept the deception, a Trump presidency is the natural consequence.

Today, however, it’s not too late for Bernie to save the Democratic Party. If Democrats truly want to win, they’ll rally around Bernie Sanders before Election Day. If Hillary Clinton cares about the future of this country, she’ll hand the nomination to Vermont’s Senator.

Many people saw the writing on the wall but you could hardly hear it before the election thanks to all the Clinton sycophancy in the media.

@LOM,
The fact that you can say that some white voters voted for Trump because they were turned off by the discussion of white privilege actually proves the assertion that Trump’s support came from racial issues. Some of the people who voted for him may not actively be racist but they certainly made their decision based race. You’re right the election result was backlash. It was backlash against black people with Mexicans and Middle Eastern people used as cover.

its true that a lot of white people based their vote on race. but a lot of others based their vote on the fact that Hillary was horrible. if it wasn’t for his glaring racism I would have voted for trump over Hillary. white people largely didn’t have that impediment.

Joe
yes, Bernie would have been the one. but what were white folks going to do? Bernie was denied the right to run because the crooked dnc stole the nomination on behalf of Hillary. and to add insult to injury, he thru his support behind the corruption, so Bernie wasn’t the choice at this point. it was too late to choose Bernie. it was trump or Clinton. the whites who weren’t basing their vote on race held their nose, like we were urged to do for Clinton, and voted for what they saw as the lesser evil. trump.

Speaking of Bernie, I wondered from the beginning why people like abagond and the black caucus didn’t throw their support behind Bernie? He obviously had a movement. But, for some unfathomable reason they insisted on Clinton. In a way, Trump is their fault. They should have rallied people to Bernie, if they thought Stein was a bridge too far. But they didn’t. They wanted crooked Hillary. And they ended up with Trump. The president they deserve.

“In Florida, the Cubans who voted for Donald Trump identify as ‘White’. They want their ‘Honorary White Club’ membership card as soon as possible.”
That’s because most Cubans are white. The ones who came right after Castro took power were mostly whites like Castro. In 1912, White Cubans carried a pogrom against Black Cubans that made the KKK green with envy ( http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/race/RaceWar1.htm).
Your insinuation that Cubans aren’t ‘really’ white is misplaced.

@nomad
“the whites who weren’t basing their vote on race held their nose, like we were urged to do for Clinton, and voted for what they saw as the lesser evil. trump.”

That’s pretty much how I see it too. You have people out there who wouldn’t want anyone to know they voted for Trump but felt they had to stop Clinton. That’s part of why her defeat comes as such a shock to some because many Trump voters were not going to his rallies or wearing MAGA hats. But once in private they did what they felt they needed to do to stop an openly corrupt politician from becoming president.

The unpalatable choice was engineered by Hillary Clinton and the DNC both through their promotion of Trump and their suppression of Sanders. They never in a million years thought that sufficient voters would have considered Hillary more rotten than Trump but that’s what happened. They called America’s bluff and America said F you, yes, we’ll elect Trump over you. Perhaps the fact that the electorate can be so surprising will dissuade similar tactics in the near future. I think there is a kind of justice in that and I can deal with it. We’ll just need to remain vigilant with this uncertain president.

Remember, Trump lost the popular vote and his favorability remains low. According to RealClearPolitics his favorable rating isn’t out of the 30s http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorableunfavorable-5493.html and Clinton’s has generally been higher. IMO, the result isn’t primarily about racial hate (though there is some of that) but is, to a large extent, about HRC being fiercely disliked for her scandals and obvious ties to special interests. Even then, it was close in terms of vote counts. That’s how bad both are.

“collectively, the white population of the United States now holds an enormous unearned advantage of wealth and power. And regardless of what kind of people we are as individuals or what we have or have not done ourselves, that advantage cannot be uncoupled from the history of race and racism in this country.”
“My mother’s father, for example, migrated from Connecticut to Wisconsin where he bought land and started what became a prosperous dairy farm. As it turns out, the land he purchased had been taken from the Ho-Chunk Native American tribe several decades earlier even though the federal government had promised to protect their rights to their ancestral homeland. That promise was honored only until white miners showed an interest in rich deposits of lead on Ho-Chunk land and so the United States reneged and called in the Army to force the Ho-Chunk from their land.

From the Ho-Chunk point of view, my grandfather was in receipt of stolen property, but since whites had the power to make and enforce the law, they could also decide what was stolen and what was not, and so he was allowed to purchase the land without a second thought. He went on to be a successful farmer in the midst of the booming U.S. economy that, as the saying goes, was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including his. For most people of color, however, who were systematically denied the opportunity to own their own ‘boat,’ the rising industrial capitalist tide brought little benefit.

When my grandfather died, the farm was sold and my mother and her four siblings each received a share of the proceeds. And when my parents bought their first house in 1954, they used her modest inheritance for the down payment. They also obtained an affordable mortgage from the Federal Housing Administration set up after World War II to help returning veterans buy their own homes. Being ordinary citizens, they may well have been unaware of the fact that federal regulations and guidelines governing FHA loans overwhelmingly favored whites over people of color, putting them on the receiving end of white privilege in one of the biggest transfers of wealth in U.S. history. Whether they knew it or not, however, the effect is the same.

My parents now had a boat of their own which was lifted by the rising tide of an expanding economy in the 1950s and 1960s, and when my wife and I wanted to buy our first house in the 1980s and didn’t have enough money for the down payment, we borrowed it from my mother.”
All of the above is true. Where I part company with the “privilege” crowd is on labeling these advantages over minorities as privileges because a “privilege”, in my book, cannot be available to the majority. Such “privilege” becomes a “right” since it doesn’t give members of that majority an advantage when they compete among themselves. If Whites eliminated all the minorities, it would be obvious that their privilege would disappear since they all would have had a stab at accumulating wealth as described above. Note that the only thing Johnson claims is the exclusion of people of color from these goodies. IN MY BOOK, THAT’S DISCRIMINATION.

Really surprised about the extent of the mischaracterization of Abagond’s support of the candidates by some of the commenters. He made it very clear in quite a few posts and comments that he originally decided to support Bernie Sanders after careful deliberation and was never a staunch supporter of Hillary. At best he was a very reluctant “hold your nose” supporter in the later stages.

I can’t figure out why he’s been adding in Wyoming of late. I think it started when you and he were discussing NoDAP on the open thread. But why just Wyoming? Why not North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho? Some of the worst white supremacist groups are headquartered there. All of those states are known for virulent racism towards Native Americans, not just Wyoming.

And of course as you pointed out, racism is everywhere. Even in a supposed ultra-liberal haven like San Francisco.

I went to university in Massachusetts and spent school breaks growing up in Alabama, while growing up in DC/MD. This racism stuff is not a North / south thing.

The main difference I found was that people in Alabama were more open and unapologetic about their prejudices and behaviour, and people in Massachusetts were more covert. It would go something like this:

(to a job applicant who is not hired due to some prejudice)

Alabama: We don’t hire your kind here.
Massachusetts: We don’t have any suitable openings now. (but they tell their boss that the applicant was xxxx(some undesired category/label).

And subsequently, employers in both places hire someone else.

Alabama: We don’t want our kids going school with n1663r5.
Massachusetts: We are concerned about our kids going to school with others from a different cultural background and who have different values. (then they whisper that they are black).

In a way, what they do in the North is worse. They obviously know what they are doing is somehow wrong, but they don’t want anyone to know what they think.

sorry about skipping some comments before responding but i call ‘staunch’ urging ‘vote for Hillary to prevent hitler. mainly. but also staunch to minimalize all of the corruption being revealed through WikiLeaks, including the revelation that she had stolen the nomination from the candidate that he originally endorsed. that’s pretty staunch.

“…a “privilege”, in my book, cannot be available to the majority. Such “privilege” becomes a “right” since it doesn’t give members of that majority an advantage when they compete among themselves.[…]

IN MY BOOK, THAT’S DISCRIMINATION.”

In my book, pitting “privilege” against “discrimination” leads to a false dichotomy. I see discrimination as a means—a tool—of people who have privilege to maintain their privilege. That is true not only in racial matters, but also in matters of class and religion. In the context of economic class, discrimination is pretty glaring: exclusive neighborhoods, clubs, schools and leisure spots. All of that exclusivity and discrimination is used to maintain the privileges of the more affluent.

I reject the equation of privilege with rights, especially in the American context. Saying that only the majority have rights is just another way of saying might makes right. Technically all American citizens have inherent rights, whether they are part of the dominant group or not. One promise of the American Experiment is that a person or group of persons did not have to be members of the dominant group to enjoy rights. The majority may rule, but various minority groups enjoy rights (at least on paper).

Various early European colonists flocked to America precisely because they wanted freedom of religion. In many European countries, in the 1600’s and 1700’s, everyone was required to pay compulsory tithes to the state church, whether you belonged to the state church or not. In America, outside of the Puritan experience, there were no compulsory tithes. Any group of citizens was free to form a church, split from an existing church or avoid church altogether.

Even when members of a dominant group compete among themselves, privilege still comes into play. Some person or persons will always have traits that create advantages in their culture. Those advantages in turn can create privilege. So even if, White people woke up tomorrow and there were no “others” and they were all the same economic class, within a few days, the smartest, the strongest and the most wily would carve out advantages for themselves and re-create a hierarchy with a privileged group at the top.

“…racism is everywhere. Even in a supposed ultra-liberal haven like San Francisco.”

In a way it is worse in ultra liberal havens for the very reason jefe mentioned in his comment upthread. Racism in those “havens” are covert and very efficient.

Both San Francisco and Seattle have effectively destroyed longstanding Black center city communities through a variety of tactics. During the period of destruction, there was a full court press of media, tax, banking, education and police attacks on those communities.

The destruction was so complete that nearly all of the Black churches have moved to the suburbs. Only those Black elders who owned their homes outright were able to afford to remain in place. Everyone else was ruthlessly pushed out.

I don’t have the essay in front of me so I’m relying on memory, but wasn’t a good part of McIntosh’s premise that privilege is often invisible to those who have it? I do remember there were a number of examples in her essay that I never thought about before the first time I read it, stuff that I had never before conceptualized as something I was privileged to have as a white person. The privileges are created by systemic discrimination but an individual can benefit from those privileges without realizing it or being an active force in the discrimination: e.g., a white elementary school student can expect most of their teachers to be white like them, which is a privilege, but the student did not personally create or contribute to the discriminatory system that led to that situation.

“Even when members of a dominant group compete among themselves, privilege still comes into play.”
Yes. You forgot my presidential motorcade example? Privilege applies to a minority, not a majority. So you agree with me or am I missing something?
“I reject the equation of privilege with rights, especially in the American context. Saying that only the majority have rights is just another way of saying might makes right. ”
I offered you no such equation. I told you that, white plebeians, are not privileged for the simple fact that they are getting the same deal as the vast majority, who are white like them. When they compete with one another, as they must, since there aren’t enough minorities to compete with them, talk of privilege is nonsense.
Whites conspire to lock out as many minorities in order to create “white solidarity”, otherwise, they’d have to face the fact that not all whites are created equal, but all whites can agree to not push one of their own below a level reserved for the pariahs of the society. In the USA, Blacks are the pariahs. Discrimination is not the same as privilege. If you want, I can accept whites have the “privilege” to discriminate as long as it doesn’t upend class hierarchy. My example of General Colin Powell ordering white redneck soldiers to battle at the peril of losing their lives illustrates that fact. Yes, might does make right, it always has.
I’ll leave you with my favorite ancient Greek quote: “Athenians: Well, then, we Athenians will use no flue words; we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have a right to rule, because we overthrew the Persians; or that we attack you now because we are suffering any injury at your hands. We should not convince you if we did; nor must you expect to convince us by arguing that, although a colony of the Lacedaemonians, you have taken no part in their expeditions, or that you have never done us any wrong. But you and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War

I was trying to find the comment but can not. Origin made a comment about having viewed a video by an astrological chartist who said that ultimately Trump would not become president. Origin vaguely recalled the video after Trumps win and realized the chartist was now obviously incorrect; though Origin wondered how a Trump loss could materialize.

I wonder if some of you have seen this yet. It is making the rounds, so to speak. It’s an article on what it means to be a “faithless elector” in the Electoral College. Something I forget about every election cycle is that the final set of voting is actually done by the electors of the electoral college and they have yet to vote; they do so in December, December 12th to be exact. I suspect that the article is circulating as a kind of trial balloon; here is where I first saw it, in The Independent:

I have a question for all the Americans on this blog (which is of course the overwhelming number of commenters here):

Would you be in favour of the Electors enacting the faithless option in order to oust Trump? (of course, you might just end up with Pence as President in the end).

It is being said by some that Pence will be the de facto President anyway because Trump is such a disaster on so many levels (he couldn’t even muster the discipline/humility to practice for his debates against Clinton). Even if Trump were not a disaster and an egomaniac, HE IS A TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED NEOPHYTE in the realm of politics and the holding of political office, to that end he’ll be like a dumb kid who’s constantly looking at the classroom work of his peers during the school day. Some of us remember that kid, some of us were that kid (and hopefully grew out of it); we know it doesn’t end well for that kid. (You guys might just get that impeachment some of you are hoping for).

———————————————————————

And yes, I am aware that I’m a contender for most parenthetical departures in a single post (so sue me!). 🙂

“Would you be in favour of the Electors enacting the faithless option in order to oust Trump? “

Except the Hillarites are looking to oust Trump AND his VP in order to re-install the Clinton gang!

petition excerpt:

“On December 19, the Electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots. If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, they would simply pay a small fine – which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay!

We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton.”

Interesting times we’re in!!! What will the Electors do? Can they be swayed by cash or other (gainful) incentives to vote for the unsavory Clinton??

I wouldn’t mind Trump being ousted but I would rather if it also opened the door for other possibilities beyond HRC or Pence. There would be serious backlash against that decision though. Would make the current anti-Trump protests look like a slumber party.

According to it:
66,862,039 for Obama in 2008
60,966,504 for Romney in 2012
60,007,707 for Clinton in 2016
59,736,883 for Trump in 2016

His argument is that the numbers suggest Clinton was the problem. She got fewer votes than Romney, who lost in 2012, did and 7 million less than Obama did in 2008. This is one of the reasons I’m slow to attribute the result only to racial backlash. That is a part of the story, no doubt, but it was part of the story during Obama’s presidency as well (gun sales famously went up) yet he still won two terms. White people voted for him and it appears a significant number who did, did not vote for Clinton. Black turn out for her was also lower. Even with a bogeyman like Trump looming too many people could not drink their HRC medicine.

@Solitaire
Sad but I’m not surprised at all. Obama’s win brought it out too but for different reasons. I have no doubt that if Clinton had won it would not have been pretty either; their celebratory racism would have been angry racism instead. A comedian has a saying that “Racism is as American as apple pie” and it’s proven so many times.

I posted a video comparing the numbers to past elections (which may still be in moderation) but I’ve also seen that there are counties with many votes still to be counted so we’ll see what the final numbers look like.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse says these fools were planning war with Russia -these fools Obama and Clinton.
” the neoconservative Barack Obama [demanded] that all of his top military generals support his goal of going to war against Russia…. … the view that Barack Obama holds and that Hillary Clinton holds even more strongly [was]that the war against jihadists must be subordinated to the war against Russia …
— is a totally upside-down view of the priorities”

“Detroit, Flint, etc, were not trashed by NAFTA. They were trashed by the Japanese.”

Maybe so. I was a bit skeptical at first but these are the numbers I came up with so I stand corrected.

NAFTA passed in 1993 and the unemployment rate today in Wisconsin is the same rate as it was before NAFTA kicked in and before manufacturing jobs left. It seems the unemployment rate rises and falls depending upon whether the country is in recession or not and not connected to trade agreements. The average household income in Wisconsin in 1993 was 31,766 and today it is 55,425 down a few thousand from 2014. That shows incomes rising and staying on par with the national average. Poverty rates though have increased from 5% mid 1990’s for whites to around 10% today. Still I don’t think you can draw a correlation between poverty rates and trade agreements. So maybe trade agreements are not the bogyman some have made them out to be.

I watched CNN mostly election night and paid attention to John King and his magic map. In regards to the rust belt he would show mostly white counties that went for Obama in the last two elections that flipped to Trump this election.

So the question is why did they flip. I don’t think it is a repudiation of the Obama years as these same people voted for Obama and Obama’s favorability ratings are pretty high. I first thought it was economic interests (free trade being damaging) but now don’t think so. Is Hillary truly distrusted ? I think that is part of it along with whites liking Trumps anti PC rhetoric as well as rural whites thinking their way of life is under attack and hating the elitism of the media and politicians.

I was just as surprised as the outcome as everybody else. So while I still hate Trump I have to admit I did enjoy watching the CNN meltdown as the reality of the Hillary loss set in.

Trump will do nothing for the poor whites from the so called rust belt states, This is the age of technology those who are factory workers and working in agriculture will continue to suffer unless they go to school and train for jobs in technology. Trump has no desire to help these people he only wanted their votes. I don’t think he even wanted the presidency this was all a game to him. I think he’s just as shocked he won the election as we are. He has no idea what to do. I don’t feel he will make it the whole four years, he will probably end up getting impeached.

As disappointed as I am about Trump’s election as president, I do think that the Democratic party needs to do some serious soul searching. CNN’s John King said that if blacks had voted in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin at the same level as 2012, Hillary would have won the presidency.

@jamaicantradingnetwork
Yes, this is the part of the story I hope people don’t miss with their concerns about Trump winning the racist vote. Those people also didn’t vote for Obama. What hurt Clinton more is that people who voted for Obama didn’t vote for her and that includes some minorities and rural/suburban whites.

I just realized something. The Republican Party have an incredible opportunity to destroy The Democrats for ages to come, and . How so?

-By eliminating racist police brutality and murder by cops. And finally prosecuting racist police to the full extent of the law. It would be so unexpected and it would diametrically contrast against Obama’s pathetic performance in this area.

-To invest in schools and infrastructure in black communities across the Union. (leading, perhaps over a two term Trump Presidency, to increased College enrollment for black males and correspondingly, higher graduation rates for black males from High School.)

-End the school to prison pipeline. End for profit prisons.

-End the misnamed war on drugs.

The above measures would destroy Democrat support amongst middle and lower class blacks for generations to come and make them staunch Republicans.

-The drastic corporate tax cuts, I’ve read about (down to 15% corporate tax, I think) will, lead to a bit of a boom, I believe.

-He is planning some massive infrastructure spending. The American economy needs radical fiscal expansion now! And not on the bloody military but in the REAL economy.

Four years or more of surprise prosperity during the Trump years would, well, come as a surprise and then some.

The business community are taking Trump’s economic plans for fiscal expansion and tax cuts seriously, else they would not be, right now as we speak, predicting inflation arising from Trump policies. Predicting inflation means they think he will have areal effect.

In just one day, we see it popping up all over the country. But it certainly did not just happen overnight.

This pent-up white male anger was always there. It has only been repressed. I remember the 1970s when vets said stuff like (I went to Vietnam so that you all would not be here). Or when they actively complained about affirmative action saying that a “n1663r” got his job (whether it was because of affirmative action or not).

”Privilege applies to a minority, not a majority. […] white plebeians, are not privileged for the simple fact that they are getting the same deal as the vast majority, who are white like them”

The White plebeian majority are indeed privileged. They are privileged in relation to non-Euro descent people. The social pyramid that places them at the bottom of White society is purely an intra-group phenomenon. Their lack of privilege vis a vis White patricians has no bearing on how White plebeians are advantaged in relation to non-White people of (any social class) in this pluralistic, multi-ethnic society. White plebeians depend upon largely invisible systems of power and privilege that work against or exclude non-White members of society, no matter their economic or educational status.

A prime example of White plebeian privilege is the treatment of White plebeians who encounter federal, state and local law enforcement agents. White plebeians routinely brandish weapons, shoot at police and commit massacres, all the while braying about their Second Amendment rights. Black people and other non-European individuals are gunned down for holding wallets, cellphones, sandwiches, remote controls or nothing at all. Abagond calls them “Phantom Negro Weapons”.

When White plebeians decide to protest anything they are generally unmolested by law enforcement. In some cases, they have been coddled by law enforcement. That occurs in predominantly Black cities as well as predominantly White cities.

Agreed. I will repeat that discrimination is a tool of privilege, not its equivalent.

”My example of General Colin Powell ordering white redneck soldiers to battle at the peril of losing their lives illustrates that fact.”

The Powell example proves nothing. Unspoken in that example is the fact that General Powell was himself a tool of an organization that is dominated and led by White patricians. As my army veteran father told me on more than one occasion, “when you are in the Army, you learn to respect the uniform, even if you hate the man in it.” Those “white redneck soldiers” are keenly aware of those dynamics and they are also aware of their own privilege outside of the Army context. In fact, White plebeians globally are aware of their privilege. Their privilege is present whether they sleep on park benches, pound nails at a construction site or clerk in a retail store.

An example of White plebeian privilege (and enduring racism) is the treatment of Oprah Winfrey on two occasions. In 2005, Winfrey was denied entry to a luxury boutique in Paris, France. In 2013, Winfrey was refused a look at an item in Zurich, Switzerland by a White plebeian clerk who told Winfrey that the £24,460 was “too expensive”. The White clerk was supported in her racism by her employer. The White writer of the article also went on to berate Winfrey for seeking to buy an animal skin product.

A big fat no on that fallacy. Might has never made right and it never will. Just because a people can do a thing doesn’t mean the thing should be done or is right. What might makes all through history is a gigantic, intergenerational mess.

➽Wars of aggression – not right.

➽Colonization – not right.

➽Genocide – not right.

➽Slavery – not right.

➽Resource theft – not right.

Finally, though I never read Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War ( thanks for the link, Abagond), I was aware of the situation that the people of Melos faced in 416 BCE. Robert Greene author of The 48 Laws of Power used the Melians as an example of what not to do when confronted by a powerful opponent. Greene argued for the tactic of surrender so that you could live to fight another day. The Athenians had the might at that moment in time, but their arguments and actions were not right. They were merely indicative of hubris.

“The Powell example proves nothing. Unspoken in that example is the fact that General Powell was himself a tool of an organization that is dominated and led by White patricians.”
It’s irrelevant that he was a ‘tool of an organization that is dominated and led by White patricians’. Why? Because these ‘White patricians’ skipped over a bunch of whites who could have done his job to pick him. Where was the ‘white privilege’ of these white contenders for the spot? Your ‘white privilege’ theory needs to explain such anomaly. By mentioning your father’s army experience, you confirmed my point but won’t concede having done so.
“”Yes, might does make right, it always has.”

A big fat no on that fallacy. ”
Fallacy, ok, where’s the evidence for your claim? All that you presented here were your opinions about what right means. I wasn’t talking about right in the sense of being just or fair, but in the sense of prevailing in a given situation. In that context, might is always right. Sorry.
“An example of White plebeian privilege (and enduring racism) is the treatment of Oprah Winfrey on two occasions. In 2005, Winfrey was denied entry to a luxury boutique in Paris, France. In 2013, Winfrey was refused a look at an item in Zurich, Switzerland by a White plebeian clerk who told Winfrey that the £24,460 was “too expensive”. The White clerk was supported in her racism by her employer. The White writer of the article also went on to berate Winfrey for seeking to buy an animal skin product. ”
Ok, how did this clerk benefit from her action? She was an idiot if she worked on commission. Her employer was equally stupid because they alienated a number of rich Blacks. When was being stupid a privilege? I see that you omitted the fact that she got a fulsome apology from the owners of the store in the first incident. Your Oprah story tells me that they failed to recognize that Oprah is a privileged woman due to their racism. I never argued that white people are rational. The history of the persecution of Jews for over a thousand years in Europe would dissuade anybody of such silly notion. The fact remains that the clerk is not the equal of Oprah, any privilege accrues to Oprah. People of African descent have lived privileged lives in racist societies for centuries. A black woman such as the wife of Joseph Bunel, Toussaint Louverture’s representative to the Adams administration, may have been looked down on by whites in 18th century Philadelphia, but that didn’t diminish her status as a woman of means. S. Laraque and his family may have encountered hostile stares as they traveled from their chateau in the french countryside to their Paris villa ,Villa Borghese , formerly owned by Pauline Bonaparte’s husband, Camille Borghese, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It didn’t mean that they were equal to or below their French servants. At the end of the day, they were the paymasters, not the white servants. I suspect that the same situation applies for Oprah, Aliko Dangote, Robert F. Smith or any other wealthy black person at the beginning of the 21st century.
How do you explain the career of jewel thief Doris Payne in light of your claims about ‘white privilege’? Apparently, enough white clerks thought she was rich enough to buy the jewels she stole. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/23/america-s-best-jewel-thief-is-an-85-year-old-woman.html

The point of the Thucydides quote was to show that unless you have power, you don’t get to voice an opinion, since you’ve got nothing to back that opinion with. Why do you think the USA hesitated to get involved militarily in Syria when it had no such qualms about Libya?

The point of the “white privilege” concept was not to argue that Oprah Winfrey is more disadvantaged than a white homeless woman sleeping on a park bench. The point is to compare each with their peers. Oprah Winfrey, for all her fame and wealth, still is subjected to biased and discriminatory treatment compared to her white peers.

That example Afrofem gave of a store clerk refusing to bring an item out from the counter to be examined? That isn’t just something that occurs at Oprah Winfrey’s level. I know a lot of PoC (including my spouse) who’ve had that experience with items under $1000, even as low as $200 (jewelry, watches, designer shoes, camera lenses, musical instruments, etc.). I’ve never once had that happen to me and it’s not even something in the back of my head as a possibility when I ask to examine an item, even when it d*mn well isn’t something I can afford.

Perhaps privilege wasn’t the best word to use for the concept since many people feel it has connotations of wealth and ease. But I can’t think of an equivalent word that wouldn’t also be objected to by white people trying to deny the effects of racism in this society and how they themselves benefit from those effects in ways that non-whites do not.

White privilege is not a guarantee of individual success, it is a systemic and societal competitive edge.

If you focus only on individual stories, you can always find exceptions and outliers. Powell’s ascension had more to do with his proving his mettle (his merit) over a period of years. He didn’t skip over Whites as much as rising like cream in spite of his lack of skin privilege. Likewise the case of jewel thief nonpareil, Doris Payne.

My focus is at the systems level. At that level, individual actions, attitudes and aptitudes are less important than institutional traditions (“this is how we have always done things”) and how one organization interacts with other organizations (“do we really want a Black salesman to represent our firm; what would that say to our prospects and customers?”). Those systems have tangible effects on the lives of millions of ordinary people, benefiting some because of skin color and disadvantaging others for the same reason.

If aggression and competition are a priority for a person or society, then might makes right—-to them. However, if peace and cooperation are a priority, might creates long lasting (and I would argue, unnecessary) pain and suffering that tumble down through centuries and generations. Everyone sees that according to their own personality and history. To me, might and aggression never make right; the consequences are not worth the pain.

“White privilege is not a guarantee of individual success, it is a systemic and societal competitive edge.”
That works only when competing against 12% of the population and does nothing for competition taking place between whites. This white privilege should, at least, prevent Whites from falling below the level of Blacks, and prevent blacks from ever rising above the white norm, if it really works. Can you categorically state that it does? If you can, tell me how it does so.
“Powell’s ascension had more to do with his proving his mettle (his merit) over a period of years.” Because he was twice as good as his white competitors? How could you possibly know that? The idea that a black person must be twice as good as others to get ahead is a much loved trope of the black middle class. I doubt its veracity. Your explanation of Powell’s and Payne’s success is no explanation. All you did was repeat that they were able to do what they did because they were good at their crafts, yet, your privilege argument would lead one to expect whites to shut them down way before they accomplished what they did. Could it be that white privilege isn’t as efficient as your argument would lead one to believe?
“My focus is at the systems level. At that level, individual actions, attitudes and aptitudes are less important than institutional traditions (“this is how we have always done things”) and how one organization interacts with other organizations (“do we really want a Black salesman to represent our firm; what would that say to our prospects and customers?”).”
My question to you is: Do you believe that such questions are prevalent in this era? Usually, people who discriminate don’t raise such questions, they simply find other,seemingly plausible reasons to turn down a black prospect.
“If aggression and competition are a priority for a person or society, then might makes right—-to them.” Put that way, you’ll get no argument from me. You only repeated what I said before. Thomas Jefferson might have found slavery to be ‘wrong’ in the abstract but vital for maintaining his lifestyle.

“Really surprised about the extent of the mischaracterization of Abagond’s support of the candidates by some of the commenters. “

I am not surprised. They are dichotomous thinkers: if you think Trump is bad, then you must think Hillary is good. As if real life was like a Hollywood movie with bad guys and good guys. If only life were that simple.

Great interview! Too bad it’s Russia TV. Straight up Putin propaganda. Even though, you know, a lot of people on their are Americans. Like Chris Hedges and Larry King,, Jesse Ventura and lesser known Americans. Still, the people on it have no independent agency and are pawns of Putin. Even if they are Americans. So forget it.

I did notice that here was yet another obviously well informed interviewee that thought Hillary was planning war with Russia. But again, it’s Russia TV. Putin probably made him say that.

This wave will gain more momentum with time and represents a materialization of the prediction,

* Racism will most likely increase and with it some other social fractures of the American society; minorities will find themselves within a more rarefied social environment;

One unknown remains, nevertheless: how will Trump react to such crude expressions of racism by his fans?

At first sight, it would appear that he would be glad to see them doing this but, being the new Father of the nation he will more likely want every of his children to behave properly/orderly and not put the whole Family under a bad light. In fact Trump has already expressed something in that direction. I only hope that the weight of statesmanship will force him to act in this same way further in the future as a President.

“At first sight, it would appear that he would be glad to see them doing this but, being the new Father of the nation he will more likely want every of his children to behave properly/orderly and not put the whole Family under a bad light. In fact Trump has already expressed something in that direction. I only hope that the weight of statesmanship will force him to act in this same way further in the future as a President.

Only the future will tell…”
Thanks for the laugh. Trump took power to execute a program. What is that program? I suspect it has something to do with destroying the rest of the New Deal and Great Society programs enacted in the 1930s and 1960s. How people talk, racist or not, is secondary.

I just read an essay about the choices facing everyone during the Trump Era. According to John Feffer, a foreign policy scholar and director of Foreign Policy in Focus, there are two primary factions of the anti-Trump camp: those who will try to engage with the Trump administration to the point of accommodation and those who are prepared for massive resistance to Trump policies.

Feffer makes it clear that he falls in the resistance camp. His position is closest to those “anti-politics” position of dissidents living in the former Soviet bloc. Feffer elaborates:

“It was, as history turned out, the right position. Non-cooperation with the Communist regimes gradually undermined their legitimacy, and they collapsed. […]

We can organize to blunt Trump’s power two years from now. We can mobilize to defeat Trump four years from now. And, more importantly, we can do whatever we can outside the voting booth to throw sand into the gears of the Trump juggernaut.”

“Donald Trump probably won’t cancel elections, but he could — and is relatively likely to — oversee a sweeping rollback of voting rights. His administration may not throw journalists in jail, but it could easily step up surveillance of domestic protesters. His appointees may not entrench a permanent oligarchy, but it could still — for millions of people in America — reduce the willingness and ability to participate in public life to zero.

These wouldn’t flout the law; they’d be under color of it and even in concert with it. But they would, nonetheless, be a tragedy for democracy.”

I recently read an eye opening article by Masha Gessen in the The New York Review of Books with the title, Autocracy: Rules for Survival. Ms. Gessen lays out six rules for ” surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.”

They include:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. “He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization…humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.”

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. “Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm.”

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. “It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat…”

Rule #4: Be outraged. “…in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. […] Trump will be able to move fast [and]… he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through [social] mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. “…damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. ”

Rule #6: Remember the future. “Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past.”

No one seemed to take notice of Trump’s recent telephone call with Taiwan’s Tsai Ying-wen, the first time in some 40 years. It seems that the western press labels it as one of the greatest threats (and the biggest one so far) to international diplomacy, whereas mainland Chinese press chalks it up to ineptitude from Trump and deviousness of the DPP on Taiwan.

And it is what, in your opinion?
It seems to signal a very significant change of attitude from US regarding Taiwan and PRChina that it’s likely to take form in a Trump’s Presidency. Maybe a support for an increased self-reliance of Taiwan vis-a-vis the government in Beijing.
Globally, I feel that the new USA administration will lessen tensions in its relations with Russia and, in the same time, increase tensions in its relations to China.
Let’s wait and see.

Of course this article is very op-ed ish and written by one of the exiled 1989 tiananmen Students, so it must be considered to be pure opinion, but it is still good to consider the points. The western liberal press has blasted the whole affair as ineptitude and maybe even the end of the world, but even before I saw these articles, I could not say that.

If Trump’s engagement with Taiwan and his subsequent anti-China tweets solidify into a new policy posture, Beijing will feel compelled to do something, but – accustomed to getting its way – it will find itself in uncharted waters and without a ready plan of action.

China might simultaneously ratchet up tensions with Taiwan and harden its stance against the US geopolitically, but with Trump apparently keen to warm ties with Russia, it will find itself with few allies other than those that are for sale. There is little leverage left to economically hurt Taiwan and a trade war with the US would hurt China as much – if not more – than the latter.

Maybe China has some more cards up its sleeve that will not hurt it economically, and hit the USA in some soft spot, but I can think of a lot of cards that the USA has. Republicans have castigated Obama for years for being soft on China, and maybe Trump is their man. Besides Russia and Pakistan, China has been playing its cards with SE Asia. It seems that Trump is seeking to disrupt this.

China could ban imports from Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu xiao bo, but it would not do things like that to the USA. It could buy up support from a couple dozen countries like Togo, Senegal, Kenya, Vanuatu and *maybe* Malaysia to impose sanctions? Its card might be North Korea.

abagond said
“another silver lining of the Trump Era is that maybe the White Liberal press will stop turning a blind eye to stuff like drones, mass deportations and weakening human rights.”
must be a closet trump supporter

“Trump may end up being more viable in November than I originally thought. This will garner lefties living in contested states more lectures on our solemn duty to block “fascism” by voting for a right-wing fanatic (Hillary Clinton) – for a warmongering enemy of workers and the environment, a friend of Wall Street and “free trade” (the corporate Clinton wing of the Democratic Party defeated efforts to insert opposition to the TPP into the party’s platform), and a genuine threat to launch World War III. When I reject that counsel and Trump wins, if he does, I am not going to take the blame for the ascendancy of the Donald. Sorry. The dismal dollar Dems and their left enablers will have a lot more to answer for on that score.”http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/dont-blame-me-if-trump-wins/

Just read this no nonsense opinion piece by Charles M. Blow in the New York Times. Titled Trump: Madman of the Year, Blow fans away the smoke and smashes the mirrors surrounding the Pres.-elect.

Choice words:

“Trump is running two post-campaign campaigns: one high and one low, one of frivolity and one of enormous consequence.

One is a campaign of bread and circuses — tweets, rallies, bombast about random issues of the moment, all meant to distract and excite — and the other is the constant assemblage of a cabinet full of fat cats and “mad dog” generals, a virtual aviary of vultures and hawks. […]

I feel like America is being flashed by a giant neuralyzer, à la “Men In Black.” We are in danger of forgetting what has happened and losing sight, in the fog of confusion and concealment, of the profundity of the menace taking shape right before us.”

“The question hanging in the air, the issue that we must vigilantly monitor, is whether the emerging shoots of egalitarianism in this country will be stomped out by the jackboot of revitalized authoritarianism.”

It’s like watching a wreck that’s about to happen. You know it could be fatal but hope instead that no one gets injured.

Trumps team is made up of some Authortarian figures so the potential for civil liberties and constitutional protections being abused is high. But I keep telling myself that what I’m seeing, though potentially bad, doesn’t necessarily mean it will lead down the path of facisim. I’m in denial.

We will have a better perspective six months from now what a Trump presidency will really mean. He currently is an unknown quality because of his lack of politicale history but who he is surrounding himself with doesn’t look good.

I suspect a lot of people are in denial. Some respond by trying to change the subject. Some lash out in anger and frustration. Some are trying to stay on even keel by reading about how other people in other places and times dealt with similar social collapses; searching for survival clues and means of resistance.

The slow motion plane crash feeling of these times bring to mind of the words of the Methodist minister, Reverend Phil Lawson:

“When you are down and depressed, or hurting or grieving, the most powerful thing you can do to sustain yourself is to get up and go do something for someone else who is hurting.

Freedom isn’t the opposite of slavery… the opposite of slavery is community.

The mistreatment of any part of the community leads to the mistreatment of the entire community. When a community is divided against itself, that community is weakened and subject to the control of others.

On the other hand, welcoming and inclusion of all community members leads to a community made whole —– and possessing genuine freedom.”

It is one thing suggesting that the status quo with Taiwan should be re-examined.

It is quite another to use the island republic as a bargaining chip or pawn to get China to make concessions on other things in Trump’s interest. Gee, those are real people who would have to live with whatever the aftermath would be.

2042: If most White people had any sense they would use this period, before they become a minority in 2042, to strengthen minority rights for everyone. But most White people clearly lack sense: they voted for Trump.

Maybe isn’t about they (the Whites) lacking sense but trying they last move to avoid becoming a minority. Some of them surely believe that the cause of changing demographics in the USA relies on wrong politics practiced for many years by both Democrats and Republicans. Eventually, they believe, by changing course on immigration’s rules, they can avoid that fate. And here President Trump fits quite well. He is the new Messiah of White Nationalists.

The handmaidens of racism: Long-term, the most unsettling thing about Trump’s win is the 29% of Latinos and Asians who voted for him. If that number grows, White racist policymaking will continue long after non-Hispanic Whites have become a minority.

Unsettling for whom, may I ask? Blacks, maybe?
I copied that paragraph because I would like to initiate a conversation (if Abagond allows me) about Black politics vis-a-vis other racial groups, besides the White majority. I have tried to search this blog and I haven’t yet found a post where the explicit topic was the position of Black Americans in relation to Latinos and Asians, groups with a far larger percent of members with feet in two worlds so to speak. There are many Asians and Latinos who are newcomers. Certainly far more than Blacks.

What do Blacks really want?
Maybe, that the USA demographic make-up changes as the current trends suggest, in order to bring a new situation where the Whites become, once and for all, a minority, like others, and, as such, learn to respect others, this is, become less racist? And in such a case, ‘welcome people from all over the World to the promised land’ where even racism became a thing of the past?
Or is it something else that Blacks have in mind?

This is not a rhetorical question. In other places (countries) people who see themselves as not having yet received their fair share of the cake in their respective societies, are the ones who are the most ardent nationalistic, and even sometimes openly xenophobic. They fear foreigners because, they think, falsely or not, that the arrival of newcomers will make even harder for them to receive their part of the national wealth. One case that happened in my part of the World, quite recently, was the outburst of xenophobia in the Republic of South Africa in 2014. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_in_South_Africa). What a significant part of the White American population is feeling today appears to follow the same course.

I can’t defend those behaviors but it seems quite common and widespread worldwide.
Therefore my perplexity: why many Black Americans – at least the intellectuals – seem to want more immigration to their country than the White populace? Are they aware that those foreigners once settled and turned American citizens can become themselves racist against Blacks, and therefore, instead of adding to the fight against anti-Black racism, on the contrary, contribute to the aggravation of the social situation of Blacks, in the long run?
What is best for Blacks, really?

“Therefore my perplexity: why many Black Americans – at least the intellectuals – seem to want more immigration to their country than the White populace? Are they aware that those foreigners once settled and turned American citizens can become themselves racist against Blacks, and therefore, instead of adding to the fight against anti-Black racism, on the contrary, contribute to the aggravation of the social situation of Blacks, in the long run?
What is best for Blacks, really?”

I suspect you haven’t had any takers on this question because it is very much a “kitchen table” conversation that Black people have with each other. Not a topic we discuss much publicly.

Black intellectuals have a high minded social justice agenda that is welcoming to all people. The rest of the Black population runs the gamut of xenophobe at one extreme to xenophile at the other. For the great middle, feelings about immigrants are contradictory, complex and ambivalent.

What would be best for Black people? Treat all immigrants like White people do: designate them as the “other” and keep them away from us. Fight them tooth and nail to keep them from taking our jobs and appropriating our spaces. Keep economic exploiters out of our neighborhoods. Become insular and highly discriminating toward all outsiders.

Black people can’t seem to do that and more because we are too soft hearted and accepting. Black people don’t want to act like White people because we consider their attitudes and actions despicable; not a positive model to follow.

“Unlike Asians or Latinos, the overwhelming majority of Blacks in America already have their foot in the door. It only makes sense to pull the drawbridge up after themselves to keep their seat next to the White man.”

@ kiwi

I see you’re still poking your blood-sucking yet pale face out from under your coffin based home. Are you not getting enough deep living dead sleep??

If you paid as much attention to the research/data as you do to your ever ongoing hysteria against all things Black, you’d be able to rest QUIETLY in peace – and stop making these outlandish and ridiculous accusations that annoys even Buffy!

The election of Steinmeier doesn’t say anything as theGerman Ferderal President is not elected directly but by federal members of parliament and state delegates. Also he doesn’t hold political power so they will always pick the least controversial candidate. As you pointed out the real reckoning will be the federal diet election. It is very unlikely that there will be a change in power, but that is exactly the problem. It’s not unplausible to say that germany is where France and Austria were 15 years ago.

For the forseeable future they have no chance. Currently they are at 10-15% in the polls (which is very strong for a new party, very few new parties were ever successful in Germany). Proportional voting ensures that any party other CDU/CSU cannot hope of getting into office (on the federal level) without a coalition. And that seems completly impossible with the current leadership in either the AfD or any other party. But 15 years ago Front Natinal seemed to be far from power as well.

For various reasons the situation in Germany is not as dire as in other Western countries, but we certainly have the same gerneral problem: the traditional parties don’t have many differences anymore and even seem to like to govern together (which was rare before). But when left-wingers are kind of ok with the conservative party and vice-versa, who will those vote for who don’t like the status quo? There is pretty much only the far-left Die Linke.

That certainly was a factor in the past. There have been many attempts to form parties right to the Christian Democrats, all unsuccessful until now. The open support by fascists has always been the kiss of death for these parties, because then conservative voters left. If it will work for the AfD to attract both conservative and far-right voters is a bit of an open question. They already came close to self-destruction when the (liberal-conservative) original leadership around Bernd Lucke left. Then they were saved by the refugee crisis. Currently the leadership tries to expell a leader of the right party wing because he critized how Germany deals with the Holocaust. Short of open Holocaust denial that is an old idea of the far-right and a red flag for conservative voters.

In order for Trump and his supporters to bring about an autocracy, they will have to subdue the general population. If large swaths of the general population is still resisting Trump six months or a year from now, that resistance will give cover to journalists, comedians, government workers and ordinary citizens to expose and excoriate Trump and the Repubs for their many lies.

Subduing the population generally easy to accomplish. Only time will tell.

P.S. I already don’t trust much of what the NY Times, The Washington Post, NPR or The Atlantic present as news. I think of it as corporate pablum.

“I don’t think subduing the general population can happen if the general population is vigilant.”

It will take more than vigilance to face down the unfettered violence and corrosive propaganda the State has at its disposal. That will likely include a mobilization of a civilian corps or paramilitary groups that have achieved success against resistant populations in other countries and in other eras.

“Trump sounded presidential because he stayed on script, didn’t insult too many people and resisted tossing his poo at the gallery?!? How low are we going to set the bar for him?”

Laugh out loud funny, but it also makes you think about how long a Black man or woman who behaves like Trump would last in the same situation. My guess is that they would never have gotten within 100 miles of the presidency. Heck, any Black person who acts like Trump would be in prison right now.

Last month, the Mozilla Blog (the company behind the Firefox browser) published an article about FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to scrap Net Neutrality for the internet. Pai, an Obama appointee, is a former Verizon lawyer. Trump named him Chairman of the FCC in January.

“[undo]…years of progress leading up to 2015’s net neutrality protections. The 2015 rules properly place ISPs (Internet Service Providers) under “Title II” of the Communications Act of 1934, and through that well-tested basis of legal authority, prohibit ISPs from engaging in paid prioritization and blocking or throttling of web content, applications and services. These rules ensured a more open, healthy Internet.

Pai’s proposal removes the 2015 protections and re-re-classifies ISPs under “Title I,” which courts already have determined is insufficient for ensuring a truly neutral net. The result: ISPs would be able to once again prioritize, block and throttle with impunity. This means fewer opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs, and a chilling effect on innovation, free expression and choice online.”

In addition to ring fencing the internet, earlier this year, Chairman Pai made cuts to a Reagan era phone subsidy program called Lifeline. This program provided low income Americans with a $9.25 a month credit to purchase broadband internet service. Writing for Media Matters for America, Craig Harrington, described the propaganda push to deep six Lifeline:

“In 2012, Fox News began pushing the conspiracy theory that President Obama was using the Lifeline program to distribute free phones in black communities in exchange for votes based on an out-of-context video of a single overzealous Obama supporter. The so-called “Obamaphones” program became such a frequent target on Fox News that Obama brought it up in May 2015 as an example of how Fox’s fearmongering coverage of poverty stokes animosity toward the poor.

During one particularly tone deaf instance, Fox contributor Charles Payne claimed the phone subsidy program was tantamount to “further enslavement of the poor” just weeks after Obama had harangued the network’s over-the-top rhetoric. When the FCC decided to further expand the program in 2016 to keep up with changing technologies — it was established under Reagan to cover landlines, expanded by President Bush to cover cell phones, and expanded under Obama to cover internet services — the pump had already been primed for outrage.”

Prior to the 2015 FCC reclassification of internet service providers as Title II common carriers, the US public waged a furious campaign with ISP’s and their supporters. Over four million Americans wrote FCC comments, called the FCC and Congress, sent boxloads of petitions and demonstrated in Washington D.C..

With Chairman Pai’s latest move, the American public is back to square one. The 90 day comment period for this rule change is open until mid-August, 2017.
Mozilla Blog has a comment form attached to the article linked above. It is also possible to comment directly to the FCC:

Ajit Pai’s next stop after his FCC gig is the same as nearly every other chairman’s: a cushy consultant’s position within one of the big telcos

The result: ISPs would be able to once again prioritize, block and throttle with impunity. This means fewer opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs, and a chilling effect on innovation, free expression and choice online.

This all boils down to three things:

1) The major telcos (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T) see Hulu, Netflix and other independent on-demand streaming services cutting into their margins for DVR/set-top box cable services. In other words, Comcast, et al. is pulling out all the stops to drag people away from Netflix/Hulu in favor of its own on-demand services, even if that means shaping and throttling network packets clearly identified as being Hulu/Netflix traffic to degrade and interrupt those services.

2) The major telcos would love nothing more than to cut off uppity upstarts like Google Fiber at the knees, because competition means lower profit margins because you actually have to stop resting on your laurels and start investing in infrastructure improvements again. I’ve always thought the telcos missed the days when it could just sit on their old copper telephony infrastructure until the end of time and rake in pure profit from various services.

3) Information isn’t just free, but it’s too free. The whole idea of flooding the Internet with false facts and fake news is just one way of counteracting overliteracy among the lumpenproletariat. The other involves slowing down and shutting down parts of the Internet until it resembles an AOL walled garden again, with only approved channels and subject matter. Seems far-fetched, but stranger things have happened…

“I’ve always thought the telcos missed the days when it could just sit on their old copper telephony infrastructure until the end of time and rake in pure profit from various services.”

Agreed. It is telling that instead of investing in more efficient infrastructure or deploying fiber, etc. throughout rural and inner city America to universalize broadband, the major telcos are purely focused on fighting competition and squashing innovation. They still refuse to change their business models.

That seems to be the way all US business is run these days. They try to achieve monopoly status, push for “deregulation” of their industry and put the milking machine on their preferred customers. If you are not the “target demographic” (affluent urban/suburban), you are kicked to the curb and ignored.

After 8 years where a Black President – Barack Obama – was harshly criticized both by racist conservatives (not believing yet that their Nation had a Black President => kind a bad dream turned reality!), and a certain Left which demanded or expected much, much more from him, well, after all these years, a true White becomes President (as it should be, after all; are Whites not the majority?) and do you know what:

It seems that God is playing the cynic with His creatures and their beliefs!
This new President is misbehaving… misbehaving… repeatedly!

For dismay of many White citizens! He behaves even worse than the despicable Blacks usually (?) do. Eventually worse than the African savages, who knows?!

His entertainment value is a double edged sword. While some Americans are laughing at his toddler antics, others are aware that those same antics can be a distraction from him fulfilling his agenda———-a project that is ongoing.

Better to tune him out and pay attention to what is going on in the background, like the attack on net neutrality orchestrated by his minions.

For dismay of many White citizens! He behaves even worse than the despicable Blacks usually (?) do. Eventually worse than the African savages, who knows?!

I dare say The Donald is America’s first Reality TV president. We Americans do love our guilt-free entertainment, even if we don’t realize the entire house is falling in around us while we’re glued to the screen.

Definitively, President Trump made a mistake when he decided to pick a fight with the press. This mistake can eventually cost him the presidency.
You can’t win a fight with the press. Period.
Even if you are a dedicated tweeter!
They will search, again and again, everything about you and your deeds, past and present, bold and significant or small and irrelevant, to get you!
I’m not even sure that in a such circumstances you can sleep well at night or concentrate in real, important political and social issues.
Look at what they do to make you look bad:

Frankly, it’s bad.
Remembers me what some people tried to do with Obama when they insisted in doubting his citizenship. Again and again, repeatedly, to exhaustion.

This way the guy in command instead of concentrating himself with important issues of the nation, get his attention continuously diverted to side issues. I would prefer that the critic focused in central issues instead of lateral ones!

I looked at some of the older posts slamming and denigrating Pres. Obama, calling him sell-out, rented Negro. Okay.
All the older poster were so self-rightous, so full of themselves, because THEY KNEW they were RIGHT about Pres. Obama.
Okay.

There is now, basically, an avowed racist as President of the US.
He speaks as a racist, and acts as a racist.

There is his counterpart, in North Korea.
Do not be distracted; if there is an exchange, we will be fortunate
if it is not an ELE. For a clear example of the slow death, see the old
movie version of “On The Beach”, with Gergory Peck and Ava Garner.
For a newer, keep-you-awake-at-night version, see “The Morning After”.

If you didn’t vote for Hillary, it means you voted and/or allowed
“On The Beach” to happen. It is the reality of what we are now facing.

Kudos to that comedienne who roasted Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and the rest of the ghouls in the Trump administration. All of them crying with their hurt feelings. This made my Sunday see the look on Huckabee-Sanders hatchet face. They all got blasted with the truth and couldn’t handle it. It was glorious.

I approve the above post, LOL! I watched the segment also and it was indeed hilarious. If you are a public figure and cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Besides, much of what she said was true.

Wow, amazing, me hearing the current POTUS condemning unequivocally White Supremacy as source of domestic terrorism in the USA!
That, I was not expecting!
And in doing so he turns himself, eventually (correct me if I am wrong) in the first White President in the USA to openly condemn such thing. History happening…

Like Nixon going to China, Trump could move the US forward in a good way in regard to racism. But he seems bent on fanning the flames, which will make the country considerably more dangerous as Whites move towards minority status while armed to the teeth.

After showing disrespect for Muslims, and then Latinos and then Blacks, the current POTUS turned recently his disrespect against Whites!
Yes, against Whites!
Because how else could one interpret this: in a historically unheard of diplomatic misstep he:
1. planned a visit to Denmark:
2. advanced a shameful proposal to that kingdom (=to buy parts of Greenland) and;
3. after the kingdom rebutted his proposal;
4. dropped the planed visit, at least for a while.
This is incredible!

If somebody told me this story I definitely would not believe!
He disrespected Whites because he clearly disrespected the Danes (who are mainly Whites) with a proposal like that to them, and he disrespected the USA citizens (who are mainly Whites too) mixing his particular dealings with affairs of the Nation turning the latter dependent of the former.
This is incredible!
It’s like me to:
1. plan a visit to a friend;´
2. a few days before the visit I propose him “to allow me to sleep with his wife”;
3. when he rejects angrily my proposal…;
4. I drop the planned visit and tell him that “no big deal, there is no hurry after all and I’ll come later…”
This is incredible! So many missteps in a so short span of time!

…
It looks like none of these things happened. Even the part of waking up to the fact that racism is alive and well — it is only white liberals that woke up slightly, and they still think it is the other whites, not them.

“What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked Blacks during the campaign. Quite a bit. At the very least, racial profiling, police brutality and especially voter suppression will almost certainly increase for people of colour. Most likely bullying and hate crimes will too.

(emphasis added)
What about police brutality against the Black population, and more specifically the killing of Black civilians, in the USA nowadays?
It seems that it receded during the current administration. At least I notice that Abagond has removed his count of the killing of Blacks by police from this webpage.
Any thoughts?
I have a working hypothesis from what I have already seen in other latitudes: if the state openly promotes racial narratives then the lower echelons of the police and even pure civilians will seek less to “make racial justice” (I wanted to say “injustice”!) by their own hands. Trump took for himself to explicitly make racist assertions (about African countries, for example) and other racists probably felt they didn’t need to do those same things themselves.
Makes sense?

“Prove that elections are are not rigged and that voting matters.”
“Wake up people to how much racism there still is in US society.”
“Provide clear-cut enemies to bring together Black people, if not people of colour and anti-racists.”
“End the Clinton infestation of the Democratic Party”.
“Strengthen the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party, bringing it back to being a party that cares more about ordinary people than big banks” (the Obama-Clinton wing).

I don’t think any of this is happening.

The country has just accepted the fact that it is racist and does seem to be in any hurry to change.

My sense is the black vote for Biden will be less then it was for Hillary. Why vote for Biden who doesnt take them seriously and the party is bringing nothing to the table.

I have seen some conversation from some about focusing down ballot and ignoring the presidential race. The idea being to chastise the Dems so that next election cycle the Dems would be forced to address black concerns.

It is time to weigh the chances of the current POTUS to get reelected.Luck has not been on his side this year.
First a unforeseen pandemic, comimg from nowhere, enter the country and in no time passes through it, leaving a trail of fear and dead.
Then, when an attitude began to take form in order to face that problem – unlock the nation, unlock the nation, whole of it!!! – , the old fractures between the power and the people came to surface as never before in recent times, stronger than usual and roaring uncontrollably.
The question of his reelection has never been so uncertain.
Maybe a Bible can help!*

*Where I live ambitious people would use instead, the Bible plus a visit to the healer/wizard to obtain the same level of reassurance for their next steps! Brave new world! Or I should say, “Old”?